TD’s desk (or, to swipe borrow Tam’s phrase, TUM Command Central):
On the left is a vintage NeXTstation loaded with NEXTSTEP 3.3. Not actually used for much, but it still works and it’s made of 100% awesome. Next (NeXT?) to it is the new/old Sun Blade 100 running OpenBSD 4.2; it’s actually headless and the monitor is connected to the Power Mac G5 (dual 2 GHz) peeking out from under the desk. Not shown is the Ubuntu Linux-powered Thinkpad T42.
Two remarkable things about this set-up:
- All this crap is actually in my bedroom, and…
- astonishingly, despite that fact, I have a real live girlfriend.
You’ll note there’s no Windows boxes anywhere; I’m not THAT tolerant.
Yeah…#2 is pretty amazing, all right.
Well, okay, not really…
What’s astonishing is that she puts up with it.
I’m trying to parse something…
Two broadly similar machines: A G4/500 and a 2.4GHz P4 (we’re both too savvy to be fooled by raw clock speed), both with 512MB of RAM, running operating systems of similar vintage (OS 10.2.8 vs. XP with a recent service pack)… And the Wintel box just absolutely spanks this Mac in general speed. Just surfing the ‘net in Firefox, the difference is night and day. And I’m not running anything else in the background on the Mac, while I’ve been less than fastidious with my system tray on the P4. I know with graphics-heavy stuff I could put it down to the big dog (for its day) 3Dfx video card in the PC totally pwning the feeble ATI unit in the Mac, but that shouldn’t make much difference just surfing the web…
The reason is simple Tam. Steve Jobs is teh debil.
10.2.x was still a bit of a dog, speed-wise. I’d probably throw 10.4 on that box. Your P4 is still going to spank it, but then it’s also consuming about 4x the electricity and throwing off 4x as much heat…
Wowsers! A real ADB NeXTstation, I’ve never seen an actual photograph of an ADB MegaPixel. I have the older “non-ADB” systems and an ADB Keyboard/Mouse (NeXT ones) but the display is something I’ve not seen. Any chance of some pictures from the side?